


Renaissance Portraits

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Marvel 1602
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:09:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A renaissance look at some heroes not previously featured in 1602.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Renaissance Portraits

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Beth CG Phoenix

 

 

A/N: All X-Men characterisation based on movieverse. Warning for slight goriness in the third story.

**Hellfire**

He's restless, without flame at his fingertips.

He carries a flint and tinder, of course, but often it takes a moment for a flame to catch from the spark, and over the spark itself he has no control. It is the crackle of heat and fire that is in his blood, and that first spark is always strangely cold, and does not sing out to him. Only once the tinder has caught does he feel safe; and that takes a moment of concentration, and oft times, in the heat of things, that moment is more than he can spare.

At night, after the torches are alight, it is different. He walks down lamplit streets with a swing in his step. If there is no one there to see, he makes the fire dance; sends it shooting like a living creature for one wax-soaked wick to another. At night, the streets are his. He doth teach the torches to burn bright, and his smile is wide, full of reckless joy. Please suggest an alternative method of payment I can make.

He dreams of ways of keeping the flame always at his fingertips.

By day, he skulks below stairs. In the kitchens, surrounded by the spit and hiss of roasting meat, it's smoky, hot and close. The fire rages; contained. He rubs the smuts from his face with smoke blackened fingers, streaking sweat and dirt through long hair. He watches the flames flicker as he goes about his tasks. He watches the people, and he doesn't ask questions, and he listens as they talk.

Servants say things, sometimes, keeping their own company. His ears burn. He learns hatred, and fear. He turns the spit; stench of herbs and rotting meat. Sulphur, a preservative in the kitchen; in church, the stench of hell.

He wonders about hell, sometimes. The place where the fires never go out.

*

He sets Roberto's fire, when he has a chance, on a winter's mornings. He sets all the fires, a job he does not resent, and he saves Bobby's for last, so that sometimes the young man is stirring as he enters, and they share a word or two, as they used to, before Roberto went away to College, to become a gentleman. Frost shimmers over the window panes; or sometimes the water in the basin is frozen over. He sets it over by the fire to thaw, and Roberto murmurs warm and sleepy thanks.

It's a far cry from the easy camaraderie of yesteryear, tearing together down the cobbled streets, away from chores and lessons and duties. But it's something, this uneasy friendship.

"Do you fear the cold, my friend?"

From anyone else, he might have thought the question strange, but Roberto understands these things, a little. Better than most.

"No," he says. It's a lie. The frost makes his fingers ache to the bone, makes them stiff and awkward. The flint will not spark, now. The air runs cold between them.

Sometimes, looking at Roberto's face comes a little too close to looking deep into a mirror. They are not the same; as a mirror face is an image, not an object; opposite and reflective, showing you your nature by not being of your nature. It is precisely because they are not the same that this closeness grew, and has never truly faltered. In the hour before dawn, he kneels beside the great bed and makes the fire rise and flair.

They are not the same; they balance. Balance is a very delicate matter, the alchemists and scientists say. The right hand acts and the left hand receives. Fire and water, phlegm and choler. Some day, a skilful enough alchemist may be able to create something out of nothing. Gold, this is what the search is for. Eternal youth. But an alchemist that could balance the world like that - he could make fire; could kindle flame without a flint and tinder.

Alchemy is a gentlemen's pursuit. A kitchen hand has no time for science.

Those that look beyond their assigned place; those who meddle with the ways of man and nature, they say they go to hell. To the place where the fires never go out.

*

"Come with me," the man from the inquisition says.

They say the inquisition burns people at the stake. They say that all of Europe will go up in flames.

In his mind's eye, the fire is already set; at his fingertips, under his control.

Hell is, perhaps, a matter of perspective.

He smiles, holds out his hands.

****************************************************************

**Wordsmith**

_My Protean lover changeth like the moon,  
First new, then hornèd, then most full and bright,  
Which next doth turn its face from me too soon   
And thus, with naught but memories of light,   
Her shape I hold within my heart and mind  
The shape of lovers past, the shape of dreaming.   
Though shapely, 'tis inconstant, yet I find   
Each shape before my eyes the more beseeming.  
Yet this I must ask, since the moon hath departed:   
Can one so changeable in form be constant hearted?_

\- attrib. Will Shakespeare

She shakes her head and laughs at him. Today, in this moment, long black hair cascades down her back. In the privacy of his rooms, her skin is luminous; a colour not meant for the daughters of men. She looks like a succubus. But it is not men's souls that she steals.

"I need a boy," he tells her. She laughs at him. Change ripples through her; she leans back on the bed, shedding the features he thinks of as her own for another face, another body. He smiles appreciatively at her craft and beauty, but shakes his head.   
"I mean for the stage," he says "I need a boy who can play a woman's part. For my latest work. I want to write a woman as she truly is." He shakes his head. "They can play virgins, my prepubescent pipsqueaks. I want to write a queen."

"Which queen?" For a moment he mishears the words. _Witch Queen._ That's it exactly. Only a woman can bewitch. Then he thinks of _witchbreed_ and shivers; not because she is, but because he finds that he does not care.

"Well?" she says. "Which queen?" The body is still male, but the voice is her own, deep and low; she always sounds to him as if she is unused to speaking in a voice which is not mimicked; like an actor who does not like to extemporise, suddenly put upon the spot.

"Cleopatra," he says. She frowns a little. "She ruled all Egypt until she was betrayed by her lover," he explains. "Then she put an asp to her breast, and died."

"Funny sort of a way to kill yourself," she mutters.

"Mm. Theatrical, though," he muses.

"Sexy, you mean." He shakes his head.

"No. Symbolic."

She is silent a long moment.

"I have always wondered why it is that you turn to history for your stories."

"When I live in a time of gods and monsters, you mean?" he says. She nods, lets the movement lead her form back into a more feminine shape. "Ah, a man cannot write about what is in front of him," he says. "He must clothe the story in a different form before anyone is like to listen."

"Cowardice," she says. Her muscles ripple. Her skin is pale, and then bright again. "Cowardice, like the skin I wear when the world can see me." He shakes his head.

"Never that," he says, reaching out to touch her arm. "Cowardice is to hide away. Sometimes you can be bravest when you're behind a mask."

"Like another's face?" she says, with a little bitterness in her voice.

"Or an old story," he agrees.

"Is that not the same as hiding?"

"Oh, not at all," he says. "Put something in plain site, and even if you dress it up, people will see it, eventually." He smiles. "I do what I do for art's sake," he says. "I write my stories for all times. I can tell stories that mean something now, if I look to history to do it."

"The old stories are the best stories?" she says, arching an eyebrow. He shrugs. "But how will you ever say anything new?" she says.

"I don't want to say something new," he says. "I want to say something worth saying."

"And what is worth saying?" she asks.

"Oh," he looks away, embarrassed. "Only the greatness of the human spirit. Only the struggle between man and his basest instincts. Only beauty, and love, and tragedy, and all that makes a human heart sing."

"Cleopatra?" she says. Her body is boyish, her voice high; like one of his actors, corseted to play a female role.

"And you will be my muse," he says. Her skin ripples, dark Egyptian eyes shine in the lamplight.

He smiles, and goes to his desk, and begins to write.

*

Upon the stage, she plays a boy's part. Upon the stage, she is every inch a queen. Upon the stage, she is herself; she is another, and the love her for what she is, and for what she is not, and for what they do not know.

Later, she takes her fight out into the world. This too is stagecraft, in its way. Her skin is luminous, and the masks, too, are her own face. She does not fear to show them to a world which has not learned to accept the fluid beauty of difference.

****************************************************************

**Wolfwinter**

My grandfather says that he remembers years when it got so cold in the winter that the rivers froze over, and even this far south the wolves came out of the forests and harried people in the very streets of London town. He says in the winter, in his day, even in an ordinary year, you could hear the wolves howling at night, when it was quiet, from the wild lands around London.

It never gets that quiet in London anymore. Not even at night. The world's moved on, the city's got bigger. It's the seventeenth century, now. London's a different place. You would catch a wild creature approaching within the city walls now, no matter how cold and desperate it got. It's not that the wolves have got weaker. That's what my grandfather says, anyway. It's that the people have got nastier. That's what living in cities does, he says. It doesn't shut the wolves out. It shuts them in. The human kind, that is, and they are much more vicious than the kind that runs on four legs.

He was a shepherd, my grandfather, before he came to the big city to live. And now I'm a shepherd too. At least, I have my flock, of sorts.

*

The report says that he was the sole survivor of a village which was wiped out by Black Death. That when the church found him and took him in, he had lost his mind. Why didn't he die? What man could say. The report said that his tissues and sinews seemed to have some strange property of their own. That the necrotic sores of the bubonic plague seemed to have claimed his flesh just as they might claim any man's; but that somehow the very corpuscles of his body had healed or regenerated themselves. Truly a miracle. God must have spared his life. And yet he was wild to look upon, and the tearing asunder of his old life, the deaths, his own madness and suffering - these things looked for all the world like divine retribution. A conundrum. That's how the report describes it, all in careful, precise Latin.

*

Burning fever. Stench of death in his nostrils, death and disease, filling the world. Pain, maddening and unending, until he howled like a wild thing. All around him, people are dropping dead, their corpses rot in the very streets; but the mercy of death does not claim him. His lips crack with fever; blood runs down his chin even as the cracks heal closed. He bites his lips, claws at his face in his delirium. He scores deep scratches down his arms with his own nails, and even as it fights the Black Death for survival, his body heals these minor wounds as soon as he inflicts them. Life and death are at war within him, and neither side will give way.

When the fever is gone, there is not a mark upon him, save for the madness does not truly pass; a wildness of spirit, perhaps, or a loneliness of the soul.

That is what the report does not say.

*

A man who cannot die must be a soldier in God's army, because the alternative does not bear thinking about.   
We test him. He feels pain as a normal man feels pain, but no matter what his body is put through, the wounds heal closed. What we can learn from this man! We open him up, watch his heart pulsing. We can establish but little about the organs of his abdominal cavity; but the ways in which musculature works upon the skeleton is clearly observable to a man of science. Watching his body, we discuss ways in which we can improve upon it; and whether such a thing would be blasphemy.

*

There were two trees in the Garden of Eden. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, which Eve was tempted into tasting from, and whereof she gave also unto Adam. And then, the Tree of Eternal Life. God cast Adam and Eve from Eden that they might not taste of this second tree, and become like unto gods.

Eternal life is a little like blasphemy. We must die to be saved.

Is his life a gift from God? Or has he stolen what even our first father did not dare to steal? Is this a second fall from Grace?

Or maybe he is outside God's law, this man; this creature who wears the face of a man, but cannot die. This is what we tell ourselves, sometimes, when we slice away his skin, when we watch it grow back.

*

Metal running through him, to strengthen his skeleton. Like armour, under the skin. Claws of metal at his hands. He will be a soldier in God's army, and his blood shall buy his redemption.

The first attempt is unsuccessful; the body's fluids corrode the metal inside it. It is weak and brittle. New metallurgical techniques must be developed.

Even after we have removed our metalwork entirely, lest its rust poison his blood beyond even his body's ability to fix, he clenches his hands into fists, reflexively, as if to make the metal spikes come forth.

*

Comes the morning when I go in to check on him, to bring him food and water to cleanse himself, and he lies as a man dead. I mutter a prayer, and go to his side.

He looks much as he did on the day the first brought him in. There are no marks upon his flesh from his time spent here; no sign of how much he has helped us to advance science, to study man and the nature of his flesh and sinews. I bend over him, lean my cheek close beside his mouth to feel for breath.

His movement is faster than my eyes can follow. I am thrown across the room, pinned to the floor by his great strength.   
Metal claws at my throat. Breath, hot breath in my ear.

"Call yourself a man of God!" His voice is rough; I have never heard him speak before. I was not even sure that he was capable of it. "What have you done to me?" he growls. The metal which we have embedded in his flesh scores into my neck. I feel the blood begin to well.

My eyes fill with tears, not so much of fear as of pity, for I have grown in my way to love this man, and would not have him prove himself a monster.

"We sought only to save you," I whisper.

"Can you save yourself?" he snarls.

*

The monastery smells of ail, of incense, and a little of blood. He vaults the wall, out into the night air.   
Freedom.

He does not remember what he is supposed to do next.

In the wilderness beyond, he can hear the distant howling of wolves. He turns his back to it, sets his face towards London town. From that way, comes the smells of humanity; food and fire.

He begins to walk. It has been a long time since he has walked any distance. It feels strange; he is remade, and there is no memory of what came before, only a niggling sense of wrongness. Something in him craves companionship, though he has learned of late to distrust men, if he ever knew otherwise.

More than anything, it is answers that he seeks. Something to fill the gaping emptiness, and keep the demons at bay.

****************************************************************

**Heroes**

_Close your eyes. Concentrate. Concentrate. Squeeze them right shut. There's a great effort in it, great enough to move mountains. Sweat running down your neck. Nose itching. Mustn't open eyes too soon. Rushing feeling. Then, open eyes onto a new world._

"You shouldn't be here!" Hiro Nakamura says to the blond haired American Indian. "Ve-ry bad! Word going to end!"

"Know that." Rojhaz bends down to meet Hiro's eye, setting the feathers in his hair dancing. "You should get out, if you can, traveller," he says. "Might get caught up in it."

Hiro shakes his head.

"I'm on a quest," he says. "Got to save New York," he tries to explain.

"Doesn't exist yet." Buckskin flutters. The frown that creases the handsome face is deep; there is an entire geography played out upon that forehead. Hiro finds himself searching the face for something familiar. The feathers and buckskin are a lie; the severity and strength and solemnity have been adopted, or adapted.

"You know New York?" Hiro says in delight.

"I knew New York. As it was. Will be, maybe. Think things have changed." Hiro nods.

"No good change," he says.

"I know," Rojhaz says. "Doing what I can."

"You are like me," Hiro says slowly. "You will try to fix it." And then, with less certainty. "I saw you in a comic book."

A glitter of something in the blue eyes which might be amusement. In another time and place, this face might be open with laughter.

"You are a brave man, Hiro Nakamura. But you cannot help me."

Hiro thinks about all the things he has learned on his journey so far; all the things he could teach this man. About taking responsibility. About the fact that a hero doesn't have to be alone. Sometimes the clichés are true; like the one about how anyone can be a hero, if they look deep into their heart. Sometimes the clichés just get you into trouble, if you think that your world will always work by those rules. He thinks about explaining, and then thinks that every man is his own hero, and every man must find his own way.

Once upon a time, real heroes wore tight costumes and star-spangled capes. Now they have to find something else to be. And this man is trying, trying the best he can.

Hiro pumps his hand, and smiles.

"Very pleased to meet you Captain. It's been an honour," he says. And before Rojhaz can say another word, he squeezes his eyes shut, and is gone, to a different past, or a different future; to a different world in need of saving.

*****************

 

 

 


End file.
